Futuristic Journalism

The future of journalism has some interesting predictions according to some of the short essays on the Neiman Lab. Five interesting points that stood out to me were the changing of social media, platform competition, numbers, accessibility instead of design and podcasts. These are examples of change that I am seeing and completely agree with.

Journalists had to learn about social media in the context of distribution and discovering. Here was a new way to distribute news to audiences, but in a clear and succinct manner. Word counts and characters were limited and catchy phrases were a much. This, for the most part, has not changed. Instead it has adapted into a new form. Social media is turning more private rather than public where news feeds are almost irrelevant and private chats and messengers are this outlet of the future. Now journalists must adapt to this new form media, and once again learn new distribution and discovery methods of news. If they don’t change with the times, they are sure to be doomed.

Not only are the platforms that exist adapting to popular demand, but they are competing for the most attention. The ones with the most activity, as a well as the most up-to-date flexibility with change, the longer they last. Competition among the platforms are only increasing as time goes on. This goes hand in hand with the next concept of numbers.

Social media traffic is all about the numbers. The number of views a video gets to the number of hits a site has, numbers can only get better as the platforms cater to their audiences.

Another point is the idea of accessibility vs design. Once a brand defines their look, audiences can usually recognize them in the long run. Once a brand develops a simple design, the focus should then turn to accessibility. People are more concerned with easily maneuvering a site than its look. The more complicated it is, the less traffic the site or company will have.

Finally, the last developing idea is poscasts. This form of media is slowly picking up popularity in the new age media era. Audiences no longer have the patience for listening to commercials in order to listen to music. Subscribers to Spotify prove that. Podcasts have a chance of becoming the future, but as some form combined with radio. Commuters, especially, still need news and traffic updates that radio provides that podcasts can’t. Also, some specialty radio shows are still popular enough to draw an audience that does not want to let go. This could develop into a merged form of radio and podcasts as a future medium.

These are just some of the ideas of the futuristic journalsim. Who knows what the future really holds.